Xcelerator Blocks

What’s an Xcelerator Block?

XLR8 and Snō’sincreased speed and enhanced performance are made possible through integrated, function-specific hardware modules called Xcelerator Blocks.

An Xcelerator Block (XB) is an optimized hardware implementation of a given function, process or behavior that resides on the programmable portion of FPGA fabric. XBs communicate with the FPGA-based AVR microcontroller through the addressable register interface.

XLR8 and Snō ship with pre-installed XBs that help with well known challenges Arduino users face:

Floating Point Math

Servo Control

NeoPixel Control

Enhanced Analog-to-Digital Converter

Both can be field-updated to change the XBs implemented on the FPGA.

In addition, users can create their own custom Xcelerator Blocks using our OpenXLR8 flow.